Yahoo! TagExplorer: Tag-based Image Retrieval

Yahoo! is working in an interesting tag-based approach for image retrieval, TagExplorer. Taking advantage of the tags users added in the well-known image-sharing site Flickr, TagExplorer uses them as metadata to retrieve images. There are two ways for searching images:

The system presents a faceted tag cloud, including locations, subjects, names, activities and time. This way, we can look for both “beach” and “barcelona” to retrieve photos showing the beach in Barcelona.

You can type your own word(s) in a text box. For instance, if we type “liverpool” as our search query, we’ll see some suggestions for related tags besides photos containing liverpool. These related tags allow us to specify our query, and they are also splitted into facets: “england” and “uk” as locations, “anfield”, “beatles” and “liverpool fc” as names, etc.

An interesting app showing how social tags can help and improve image retrieval. Awesome!